CASE STUDY | FRIEZE FAIR HANGING WITH THE COOL SET Controlling the internal environment of the Frieze Los Angeles art fair is essential to ensure Hollywoods celebrity set are not distracted from the serious business of buying art. Molly Tooher-Rudd talks to msteps Sasha Krstanovic about the comfort strategy at the five-day art event T here is always a sense of trepidation on the first day of Frieze Los Angeles, the citys most prestigious art fair. Hundreds of dealers are hoping to persuade Hollywoods rich and famous to buy art from their collections, and day one is when the biggest deals take place. A successful day selling to art-loving stars such as Jay-Z, Leonardo DiCaprio or Brad Pitt can make a gallerys year. Keeping sellers and collectors comfortable as they negotiate million-dollar art sales is of paramount importance. Frieze Los Angeles is held in a series of temporary tented structures, so controlling the rarefied environment was a particularly demanding challenge for consulting engineer mstep. The galleries can be super-sensitive to environmental conditions, says founder of mstep Aleksandra Sasha Krstanovic FCIBSE. Dealers are trading very expensive collections with delicate people. They dont want to be sitting around getting hot and flustered. We have to be aware of how the temperatures affect the clients and their business. To ensure every gallery at Frieze sits within a comfortable temperature band, Krstanovic has a small army of helpers, with handheld infrared thermometers, recording whether spaces are within an acceptable range. Variations in temperature can be caused by the position of the sun, the proximity of doors and, in some cases, by the biggest celebrities on the planet. Last year, we had Beyonc visit the show, and it was amazing to see the surge of heat move across the space as the crowds followed behind her, remembers Krstanovic. We had to guess where she was going to go next and push the air con up to cool everything down. The history of Frieze Frieze is one of the contemporary art worlds most influential trade fairs, attracting international galleries to exhibit and sell at exhibitions in London, Los Angeles, New York and Seoul. It was set up in London in 2003, before expanding to New York in 2012, Los Angeles in 2019, and Seoul last year. While the New York and Seoul fairs are held in 38 November 2023 www.cibsejournal.com permanent exhibition centres, the London and LA shows take place in tented structures. In LA, the tents are set up by temporary events specialist Production Glue. It takes four weeks to build the site, in an operation that, according to Krstanovic, requires a remarkable amount of coordination. Frieze first came across Krstanovics desk while she was working at Aecom as the arts and culture lead, and she took the project with her when she founded mstep, an MEP engineering and environmental consultancy in London. For someone who has an interest in art, Frieze is just phenomenal, she says. Before signing a contract, Krstanovic says a lot of technical design work was undertaken to remove any risk. The main thing was to agree a floating setpoint with Frieze, which we agreed would be 26oC when the external is not outside of its standard extremes which, in LA, is 33oC. If it goes to 40oC, we are allowed to go higher, she says. The decision to allow for a slight temperature fluctuation makes significant savings in cooling loads. We dont need to maintain a We don t need to maintain 24C the closer we try to control temperatures, the more energy intensive it gets